From light-up shoes to smart watches, wearable electronics are gaining traction among consumers, but these gadgets’ versatility is still held back by the stiff, short-lived batteries that are required. These limitations, however, could soon be overcome. In the journal ACS Nano, scientists report the first durable, flexible cloth that harnesses human motion to generate energy. [...]

Since he was a teenager, engineer Sergio Castellanos had the desire to study abroad to prepare and do research in the best laboratories, particularly on solar energy. With six years of stay in the United States, first at the University of Arizona and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, his dream [...]

Can an industrial robot succeed both at removing the breast fillet from a chicken, and at the same time get more out of the raw materials? This is one of the questions to which researchers working on the CYCLE project now have the answer. They have built a fully-functional robot in the lab to [...]

If you can uniformly break the symmetry of nanorod pairs in a colloidal solution, you’re a step ahead of the game toward achieving new and exciting metamaterial properties. But traditional thermodynamic -driven colloidal assembly of these metamaterials, which are materials defined by their non-naturally-occurring properties, often result in structures with high degree of symmetries in [...]

Magnetic materials form the basis of most hard disc drives as they are able to store data. A team from the University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering have been investigating whether they could also be used to perform calculations, and so take on the role of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). Lead researcher, Dr [...]

RMIT University researchers have brought ultra-fast, nano-scale data storage within striking reach, using technology that mimics the human brain. The researchers have built a novel nano-structure that offers a new platform for the development of highly stable and reliable nanoscale memory devices. The pioneering work will feature on a forthcoming cover of materials science [...]

In experiments using the wonder material graphene, ETH researchers have been able to demonstrate a phenomenon predicted by a Russian physicist more than 50 years ago. They analysed a layer structure that experts believe may hold unimagined promise. Anastasia Varlet works as a doctoral candidate in the research group headed by ETH Professor Klaus [...]

A flexible display incorporating graphene in its pixels’ electronics has been successfully demonstrated by the Cambridge Graphene Centre and Plastic Logic, the first time graphene has been used in a transistor-based flexible device. The partnership between the two organisations combines the graphene expertise of the Cambridge Graphene Centre (CGC), with the transistor and display [...]

In the consumer electronics industry, the mantra for innovation is higher device performance/less power. Arun Thathachary, a Ph.D. student in Penn State’s Electrical Engineering Department, spends his days and sometimes nights in the cleanroom of the Materials Research Institute’s Nanofabrication Laboratory trying to make innovative transistor devices out of materials other than the standard semiconductor [...]

A novel combination of microscopy and data processing has given researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory an unprecedented look at the surface of a material known for its unusual physical and electrochemical properties. The research team led by ORNL’s Zheng Gai examined how oxygen affects the surface of a perovskite [...]